Sleeping Dogs PC demo now available on Steam

Sleeping Dogs was released last week and the game has since been garnering positive reviews from critics and gamers alike -- it currently has a metascore of 83 in our Product Finder engine. If you’re on the fence about spending your hard earned cash, however, Steam is now offering a free demo for PC.

The game is also available on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles, but publisher Square Enix reportedly green lighted extra resources for a higher-quality PC version. Among the perks you can expect is support for DirectX 11 graphics effects, a separate 5GB high-definition texture pack (not included in the demo, it seems), interface optimizations, and support for multiple monitors as well as stereoscopic 3D.

Developed by United Front Games, the game was originally titled True Crime: Hong Kong and supposed to be a reboot of the True Crime franchise owned by Activision, but the latter canceled work in February 2011. It was later revived as Sleeping Dogs after Square Enix acquired the rights to the game. According to senior producer Jeff O'Connell, under Activision the plan was for the PC edition to be outsourced, but United Front got to develop it internally and “make sure the PC version was everything it could be.”